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We've had our first full week with the Instinct, and are still thrilled.

Stocking stuffers included belt cases for each of us. I'm surprised that members of the family who previously laid their phones on the entry way table when they came in from outside, now sometimes keep their phones on them in the house. Increased use of text messaging with friends is one cause.

And yes, we have been known to call each other, even text, from within the house.

My son made his longest solo drive this week to a place he'd never been, and did so without any missteps using the Navigator. That in itself is worth the price paid.

Newest application added just today : Google Maps. It has satellite view but not yet street view. I can see this being a big help. Recommending without extensive testing. Go to Getjar.com on your phone, and input code : 36398.

Following the advice of both a knowledgable friend / Sprint sales person, and the users on the forums, the first thing I did after opening the phones was to invoke updates of the Operating System and email application. I knew from following the forums before buying that a major, long awaited upgrade had occured in late November and and the email application had been updated in early December. The update allowed the phone to use some Java applications that needed a keyboard, and view Office and PDF documents when attached to an email. And again, following the advice of the forums, I installed my first application. Opera Mini. The built in browser is okay, and apparently a lot better than it used to be, but Opera Mini has a better reputation. I downloaded from here. One nice thing, you can download the PC version of Opera and synchronize bookmarks between your desktop and mobile. I don't want all my desktop bookmarks on my phone, but having my phone's bookmarks on my deskt…

I've spent countless hours learning on those forums, and the users have been generally very helpful and informative. A lot of the tips & tricks you'll see here are from those excellent sites. Be sure to check them out and contribute if you are thinking of, or b…

From JKontheRun I learned tonight that Google has a new mobile page where you can read 1.5 million public domain books. I tried it just now on my Instincts and it works great. Go to http://books.google.com/m .

I've already bookmarked a couple books I've wanted to read.

As long as you have a web connection, you'll always have something to read.

This family of simple flip phone users moved up to smart phones yesterday.

At first blush, we are thrilled. We've been out running errands all day today, and have made test runs using the Navigator, found dinner with Live Search, web surfed while out to learn something we needed to know and of course, phoned and texted.

I can see this as another life changing gadget, just as the PC and regular cell phones once were.

The editorial concludes : 'Restoring America to its role as the world’s Internet leader could be an important part of Mr. Obama’s presidential legacy." It also has this pithy quote : “This is the Eisenhower Interstate highway moment for the Internet,” argues Ben Scott, policy director of the media reform group Free Press.

I primarily use Firefox, although I use Internet Explorer too for some specific things.

During the work day I tend to have a lot of tabs open in Firefox. My company uses web based email, CRM, and calendar. Plus there is the companies own Intranet site to keep open, and the company website. I was noticing memory use of Firefox growing a lot through the day. It might start up using about 330K and grow to over 500K. That could bog down my system. I could exit Firefox, restart it and all would be fine again for a while. It was like using Windows 3.1 again!

And it may be worse on my system. I suspect my PC could benefit from a wipe and reinstall of Windows and all the apps, but man, that would be a huge job now.

Chrome uses a different scheme for memory management. You can see the memory usage for each tab by typing "about:memory" in the address box. I am going to try it out for a week and see if it bogs my system …

Since our family is now three adults, my wife and I and the > 18 yo son, I can't get away with just buying myself a SmartPhone. It has to be three or none.

A smart phone is not very good without unlimited data and unlimited text messaging. Pricing out 3000 minutes for the three of us to share is an eye opener.

Best I can figure, AT&T wants $300 a month, Verizon (our current provider) wants $350 a month, T-Mobile $215 a month and Sprint wants $190 a month.

So that leaves Sprint & T-Mobile as my candidates. Verizon has the better coverage in our area, which is why we switched from T-Mobile to them two years ago. But paying $135 more a month (or $160 more if we choose Sprint) is way too much of a premium.

And I want the Android phone over the iPhone anyway (that's a future topic). Right now, the only Android phone in the US is the G1 from T-Mobile.

Problem is, we left T-Mobile because their coverage of our street is abysmal. With the carriers now offering street level…